East Rochester School ... and seven others

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Posted May. 9, 2013 at 3:15 AM

Posted May. 9, 2013 at 3:15 AM

In the letters to the editor column below, Rochester School Board member Sue O’Connor and local activist (and former state representative) Fred Leonard have a respectful exchange of views about the future of East Rochester School, which lacks classroom walls, thanks to a misguided educational fad for open teaching space about 40 years ago.

Leonard balks at the current School Board proposal to spend more than $13 million to tear down part of the facility and rebuild, and he makes the point that the test scores of students who have gone through their early years in ERS are not impacted in any noticeable way, when compared to the other seven public elementary schools in Rochester. He is certainly familiar with the school, as his children attended there, and both he and his wife were active members of the PTA during that time. O’Connor counters, from her experience of working with ERS children, that noise (not contained by walls) is an issue, as is air quality and, at times, classroom lighting, while the vibrating HVAC system is a distraction. She makes the case that the facility is substandard.

The School Board and administration have been publicly debating what actions to take for almost 18 months, and earlier in the process, the price tag for a fix was estimated at around $7 million. Now that projected cost has almost doubled. The City Council has been formally approached, because with any major project of this nature, a joint building committee, comprised of members from both bodies, must be formed — provided a majority of each body is on board with it. That’s a big proviso, given the latest price tag, and the complete absence of state building aid.Meanwhile, Leonard is also making another point — that it is time to consider consolidating Rochester’s eight elementary schools in order to reduce the cost of maintaining so many educational facilities. Dover, for example, with a slightly smaller elementary student population, has just three schools, but a check of the Fall 2012 NECAP scores show their students are performing as well as, or a bit better than Rochester’s. Of course, there are socio-economic factors at work here, as well as the size of the student body, so we will leave it to the experts to unravel that knot. We can say, though, that larger school populations (but not too large) seem to leave students at no academic disadvantage.

More interestingly, for the taxpayer, the NH Department of Eduction’s website shows that the average cost per elementary student in Dover for the 2011-12 school year was $9,631, while the equivalent figure in Rochester was $13,170 — a tremendous difference that surely can’t be fully explained away by Rochester having more special education students. In Rochester, the latest DoE figures show it costs more to educate an elementary student than a high school one, which is not the case in Dover, nor Somersworth, for that matter.

It is not entirely clear how the DoE arrives at its numbers, but if the cost of building maintenance — furnaces, repairs, playgrounds, janitors, snowplowing, canteen facilities or food delivery, and more, is taken into account, three elementary schools will be cheaper than eight schools every time, wouldn’t you think?

The City Council voted, Tuesday evening, for a Joint Building Committee (with the School Board) to explore the renovation plan. They will surely consider the points made above, and while they did not see fit to appoint Leonard to the School Board, recently, we hope they’ll give his views on this matter some credence.